Memory in very young children: Exploitation of cues to the location of a hidden object

Abstract

Two experiments investigated very young children's use of different kinds of stimulus information to encode and search for the location of a hidden object. Two age groups (21- and 27-month-old children) watched as a small object was hidden in one of four containers. After a 30-second delay, they were encouraged to retrieve the object. When the hiding places were visually distinctive, performance was excellent, and there were no age differences. However, when the same distinctive visual information was a less integral aspect of the hiding location, age differences appeared; older children were more successful than younger ones at using the distinctive cues that were associated with (but not intrinsic to) the hiding place. Cue salience was also shown to be important, with real-object cues facilitating performance more than picture cues. In addition, performance varied as a function of whether the cues remained stationary or not. The data indicate that very young children have difficulty integrating unrelated information. Information that is successfully exploited when it is intrinsic to the hiding place of an object may be ineffective when it is not intrinsic, that is, when the children must themselves integrate it with what must be remembered. In particular, young children have difficulty linking together separate relations among objects. The results from these studies are related to the existing literature on location memory in young children, and a general progression in the ability to integrate information in the service of memory is identified.